EHX Big Muff Pi Black Russian #2
ID: 752
Price: $450
Shipping: TBD
Dimensions: 10x8x5
Weight: 2 lb 3 oz
Excellent condition with a few minor dings and paint flaking and rubbed off. The battery compartment door is missing. The paint job on this model of the black Russians was notoriously poor and easily flakes off. This one looks OK now, but if you play it much, you'll no doubt have the same paint flaking problems as everyone else.
This pedal has been modded. A long time ago I used to buy these black Russians and upgrade them. A lot of them didn't sound that great, but were easy to improve. This model was made with lots of different component types, yielding pedals of widely varying tone. It is pretty easy to mod them to make them sound like other versions of the Russian Big Muffs - Civil War, Tall Font, Bubble Font, Red Army, etc.
I did replace the flimsy vinyl battery snap with a hard plastic one. And I added an external power adapter for a normal 9VDC Boss style power connection. Looks like I also added or upgraded a ground wire as part of the power jack addition. It also looks like maybe I replaced the footswitch. That was a common upgrade to some of the pedals of this model because they didn't have true bypass switching until near the end of their production run.
I kept records of all my mods, but I'm not able to find some of my records for that far back, including my notes for this pedal's mods. However, I know I made the power related mods above and probably the switch change. Most of the ones I modded I also changed to the earlier Civil War version specs. I see at least one resistor I changed out, so I probably changed a couple of other components along with it to get it to Civil War specs. However, it still has the original transistors. I think I did that to all but one of the black Russians I modified, and that one is listed separately. Sorry I can't be more definitive about modifications.
